For the majority of universities and colleges in the United States, educational course development remains a challenging, expensive and time-consuming process often requiring repetitive hands-on involvement by college professors, department chairs, deans, and administrators. Only a fortunate number of educational institutions can afford to have specialized in-house curriculum development groups work with college professors and handle much of the development process. Certain large universities and colleges are engaging outside organizations to provide developed courses of instruction principally for large audience on-line programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels further removing oversight and approval from the universities administration. This situation is similar at lower grade levels where teachers in public and private schools with limited time and resources may preferably repeat lessons year after year with only minor modifications rather than put the time and substantial effort required in to develop new course materials and curriculums. As educational mandates are enforced and financial challenges are faced at all academic levels, it is more and more critical that an institution's educational administration can monitor and approve course development activities to assure alignment with competency requirements to maintain and achieve competitive advantages over other institutions.
Currently in developing a course, the professor or other educator is given the core and specialization competency requirements developed for the course by the educational institution and must use this information to develop the course content and the syllabus to coherently structure the material within the available calendar days when the course will be presented. While some educational institutions may provide technical assistance from professional instructional designers, software technicians, and/or IT specialists, the duties of these individuals may principally involve advising on technical issues and placing the completed course on the school's learning management system platform, leaving the college professor with the onerous process of considering how to create and/or supplement the course content with additional material to meet the core and specialization competencies.
The professor must create course outcomes and learning objectives to align with the competencies which in some cases means the professor must develop entirely new course content or extensively update existing course content to meet these requirements. They must then divide the course content into classes with specific topics which align with the school calendar, and the core competencies, specialization competencies, course outcomes and learning objectives leading to the goal of developing the course syllabus. At any point in time, if the educational institution and/or the professor changes any core or specialization competency, any course outcome, any learning objective, any class topic or any date when the class will be offered, the professor must make the required amendments and update any portions of the course documents that are effected by the amendments. He must then go back to the beginning and carefully step through and re-read the course documents to determine whether the course competencies continue to align with the course outcomes and learning objectives, class topics and dates. At various points in the process the professor may submit the course for review to their department chair, dean, associate dean and/or others which may require repeated back and forth steps of review to reach approval. If changes are required, the professor is again required to review how each change impacts the course competencies within each part of the course. Additionally, the current curriculum development process may also necessitate that the college professor have a high level of computer skills including, but not limited to: experience with the full Microsoft Office Suite of applications; specialized software applications involving audio/video production; and ultimately an understanding of issues with the integration of the course with the educational institution's learning management system.
While appropriate course development is critical for an educational institution to demonstrate with evidence that it meets the requirements of accreditation, the process of substantiating this can be a huge task for an educator with each professor required to substantiate and document their course work in order to provide the necessary work product for the accreditation process. This evidence must include an assessment that a course can articulate the purposes, content and intended learning outcomes of its competency requirements. The criteria for accreditation include any number of factors, and must primarily show there is a focus on student learning and that learning objectives are met. The software application of the present invention provides a secure web environment that efficiently makes each professor or educator an accomplished competency based course developer, capable of developing a course that will meet the demands of accrediting agencies as if each school had their own specialized in house or out-sourced course development group.